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Florida man caught illegally feeding wild alligator resists arrest: "He's a good boy... and he loves bagels."
(lemmy.today)
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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We are not equating anything. You stated that many bad things exist somewhere else so therefor one bad thing should be permitted. By the same logic, anything is permissible. It's stupid.
Gators do not produce the enzymes needed to process wheat glutens. Bagels will likely give the alligator relentless bowel inflammation and diarrhea, potentially cause kidney failure and death. What an animal can eat, including humans, is limited by the evolutionary traits they developed in order to eat things.
Got it, so they need gluten free bagels
So I've been reading a lot about gators today because I had the same question after seeing this. I couldn't find a single source to confirm what you claim about gluten intolerance in alligators. I found several papers on diet and nutrition where alligators were fed grains, and were found to consume plant material in their native habitats.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0044848613003293 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622175863
I don't need to prove that Gators don't have the enzymes to digest wheat. There are countless things that gators don't have the enzymes to digest and nobody is stupid enough to go through the list and test for each one.
Gator's have no fucking reason to have that. Gators have never relied on wheat as a food source.
If anything, the ball would be in your court to prove it exists.
I finished reading the studies and I like to point out that the first study shows while proven to not cause any immediate harm during the 1 year study period it does show the gator does not fully digest the samples. It also lacks a lot of information on the methodology, such as particle size of the food, temperature, and force-feeding procedures. One of the studies that cites it points all of that out. Another study that cites it is specifically about forcing the gators to purge undigested foods from their body as a common practice in aquaculture, as was the first study you linked to: industry funded studies to get questionable practices past regulators.
I think a better study to cite would have been this 1988 study on specifically what enzymes were found in the intestines of the american alligator: LINK
The abstract doesn't relate to our discussion at all, unless you can prove those are the only enzymes present in the entire digestive system. It only sampled the small intestines, while we know that different enzymes are present throughout the digestive system, like how humans have amylase in our saliva. It doesn't tell us how those enzymes interact with different food sources either.
As for whether someone should research such a topic, that's why we have science. There's a reason we don't have some guy going "duh, obviously" in a lab in place of like... tests. People have studied what gators can eat. I found two studies on it in less than an hour of searching. I see no grounds to dismiss these studies as they're pertinent to our discussion. If we dismiss every study sponsored by some kind of industry we'd be left citing highschool science faires.
The sugar of the bagle sure also is a problem right?
I'm not saying anyone should feed bagels to alligators. I'm debating what this person said would happen if they do.
You were so busy feverishly masturbating your intellect at me that you didn't notice I already agreed with you. Nice.
Let me guess, smarmy response to this response incoming.....
Iol this statment needs to be in a movie.